World Wide Words -- 22 May 04
Michael Quinion
TheEditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri May 21 16:44:37 UTC 2004
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 393 Saturday 22 May 2004
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Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Interesterification.
3. Sic!
4. Weird Words: Megilp.
5. Noted this week.
6. Q&A: Over a barrel; Nineteen to the dozen.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Useful URLs.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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JUMP THE SHARK In response to my query whether this American slang
phrase had an existence outside television, a number of subscribers
said they had encountered it in the political arena in reference to
a politician whose policies (to borrow another allusion) were past
their sell-by date, or to an event in a candidate's campaign that
marked the effective end of their hopes of election. Ethan de Seife
e-mailed thus: "Here in the midwestern US, at least, the phrase
'jump the shark' surely does refer to the point at which anything -
not just a TV show - goes irrevocably downhill. Moreover, there
seems to be a consensus that 'jump the shark' itself has jumped the
shark." And many subscribers pointed out that Fonzie didn't jump a
shark tank on a motorcycle but water-skied over a shark in a bay.
SEASON VERSUS SERIES A minor difference of terminology caused many
subscribers to e-mail me. I mentioned the fourth series and fifth
series of West Wing. This is the usual British way of describing a
set or group of programmes run consecutively, for which the usual
American term is "season".
ME AND I Lots of classically trained grammarians among subscribers
jumped on me for writing "Many subscribers better versed than me in
Shakespeare ..." last week, pointing out that it ought to be "than
I". It's worth taking a moment over this, not just so I can justify
myself, but because it illustrates a subtle grammatical point. In a
sentence such as "Diana has better manners than I", the word "than"
is a conjunction, implying there's a hidden "have" after "I". On
the other hand, in "Diana has better manners than me", "than" is a
preposition, which requires the object case. So you can argue from
grammar that either is correct. However, style guides agree that
the latter construction appears mainly in relaxed and informal
situations. This newsletter surely is one of those.
A closely similar problem occurs with pronouns after "but", when
that word means "except". Only two subscribers queried what I wrote
in the piece on "gadzooks" in the same issue: "Nobody but he these
days utters this word ...". Is "but" a conjunction, which would
require "he" (as I had it), or is it a preposition, which would
require "him"? Fowler says the situation is ambiguous and that the
best way out is to use the subject case when the "but" is before
the verb (as it is in this instance) and the object case when it
lies after it (so if I had written, "Nobody utters the word these
days but him", that too would have fitted Fowler's rule). Other
style guides generally agree.
LYKE WAKE WALK In referring to this walk in my little squib on the
word "dirger" last week, I might have mentioned that the name of
the walk was almost certainly taken from the poem, A Lyke-Wake
Dirge, an anonymous seventeenth-century work.
2. Turns of Phrase: Interesterification
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This jargon term of the food-processing industry is not yet, as far
as I know, in any dictionary. But it is one that has been turning
up more frequently in the past few years as a result of increasing
concern over side-effects of the technologies that produce some of
the processed foods we eat. Manufacturers of products such as cakes
and biscuits need fats in solid form, but unsaturated fats usually
occur as liquids, so makers have commonly converted them to solids
by hydrogenation. The problem is that some of the fat is converted
to a type called trans fat, which humans can't easily digest. As a
result, firms are instead starting to turn to interesterification,
in which acids or enzymes modify the fats to make them solid. (The
name comes about because the component fatty acids in the oils are
combined with organic groups and are so technically esters; these
are shifted about within the oil molecules during the reaction.)
The process has been known for at least the last two decades, but
is slowly becoming commercially viable. Some critics claim it is
open to similar objections to the older hydrogenation method. A
variant spelling, "interestification", sounds as though it might be
something that enhances your interest in a subject. It's certainly
a process being carefully watched by nutritionists.
3. Sic!
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Peter Carnell is a freelance copywriter who naturally takes a keen
interest in the way that rivals promote themselves online. He was
delighted to find this finely honed text on one British Web site:
"If you've not used a professional copywriting service before, you
need to talk to [name deleted to protect the guilty]. We'll show
the devastating impact that lively and totally memorable copy can
have on your staff, customers, prospects and profits!"
"There is a Latin American restaurant not far from where I live,"
Margie Nathanson e-mailed from Pennsylvania. "A local paper wrote a
review that, overall, was good. However, this line caught my eye:
'A good first impression is made by the basket of hot pressed Cuban
sandwich rolls or a bowel of nachos and salsa.' Maybe I won't eat
there after all."
Carl Bridge, who lives in Staffordshire, spotted a temporary road
sign on the main road into his village which warned that traffic
was just about to encounter "Slow workforce in road".
A warning to be careful of your suffixes, from an editorial in the
Guardian on Thursday: "Fortunately it soon became clear that the
substance thrown at Tony Blair from the guest balcony of the
Commons chamber by campaigners on behalf of Fathers 4 Justice was
nothing more harmless than purple flour."
4. Weird Words: Megilp
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An outmoded painting medium.
How to make an art conservator shudder: mention megilp. It was a
medium popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. You made
it by mixing a mastic resin (which comes from a Mediterranean tree
that's related to the pistachio) with linseed oil that had been
boiled with a lead compound. This produced a jelly-like substance.
Painters of the time loved it because it made paint easier to work
and quicker to dry and gave a rich, "buttery" quality to colours it
was mixed with. An eighteenth-century writer said that it "produces
that warmth and serenity which characterizes the peculiar merit of
Claude Lorraine". The problem is that in time it turns the paint
yellow or brown and makes it so brittle that it cracks. If you've
wondered why paintings by J M W Turner no longer have the luminous
quality they reportedly had when first painted, blame megilp. For
these very good reasons, nobody uses it any more. Where the name
comes from is not known; the term appears about 1760 with no clue
to its origins. It's also a rather rare surname, and some say that
it may have been named after its inventor. This seems unlikely,
because it has been written in many ways, including "majellup" and
"McGilp".
5. Noted this week
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EDIACARAN It was pleasant to hear this week that a word geologists
have been using for four decades now has an official meaning. The
International Stratigraphic Commission, part of the International
Union of Geological Sciences, has just decided that the geological
period from 600 to 542 million years ago is officially to be called
the Ediacaran, and not the Vendian, the name that some scientists,
in particular those in Russia, have preferred. The decision ends 8
years of deliberation. The official name commemorates the Ediacara
Hills in South Australia, north of Adelaide, whose rocks contain
beautifully preserved fossils of animals from that time.
6. Q&A
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Q. Last week, you mentioned the expression "to have somebody over a
barrel", meaning to have that person at your mercy. However obvious
it may seem, I would like to know the precise source of this
metaphor. [Norm Brust]
A. It might not be that obvious. My first reference point, as so
often, was the Oxford English Dictionary, which finds the first
occurrence of the expression in Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep of
1939: "Some day you might use that gun again. Then you'd be over a
barrel." This makes it sound as though the barrel in question is
that of a gun, but - as we shall see - Chandler is making a joke on
a saying that, notwithstanding the OED, was at that time already
well known.
The OED suggests that the allusion is to placing a person rescued
from drowning over a barrel to clear their lungs of water. This
might sound rather unlikely, but there are many references in the
literature to show this was once a common practice, as for example
in The Flying U's Last Stand by B M Bower (1915): "Then they began
to work over him exactly as if he had been a drowned man, except
that they did not, of course, roll him over a barrel." An article
in the Trenton Times of New Jersey in August 1885 that explained
how to resuscitate a person warned against the technique, clearly a
traditional one: "In the first place they should be brought in face
downwards, and then laid upon their faces, so that their heads are
lower than the nether parts of their bodies, and the water they
have swallowed can go out. There need be no rough action to secure
this result. In fact, the rolling of a person over a barrel or
other rough exercise might be the means of killing them."
The figurative expression is much older than the OED was able to
discover - the earliest I've been able to turn up is this from the
Woodland Daily Democrat of California, dated January 1896: "To use
a vulgar expression, a Republican congress gleefully assembled in
Washington for the express purpose of getting President Cleveland
'over a barrel.' The humiliating predicament in which the aforesaid
congress now finds itself is ample evidence that Mr. Cleveland has
beaten it at its own game."
I'm also unsure about the claimed source. There are instances
recorded from this period and earlier of a person being placed on
or rolled over a barrel as a humiliating punishment. One case was
that of a student hazing at a college in Ohio, reported in the
Frederick Daily News in Maryland in 1886: "Once inside he was at
the mercy of his captors, and the treatment he received was cruel.
Bound hand and foot, he was rolled over a barrel." This is by far
the more likely origin, since a person held over a barrel is
helpless, whether face down or face up. It fits the meaning of the
phrase much better than the resuscitation one does.
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Q. A dog came to visit my work today. He was very excited at being
in a new place with lots of people to greet. This was evident in
his bobbed tail wagging so fast it became a blur! One of our
clients, a polite Brit of 80-odd years, commented, "Oh look at its
tail! It's going forty to the dozen!" She was unable to give an
explanation of the meaning of that phrase. And it's certainly one
that isn't used in Northern Arkansas, USA. Any ideas? [Karen J
Mora]
A. Inflation is everywhere, it seems, even in language. The usual
form is "nineteen to the dozen"; on occasion I've come across
"twenty to the dozen", but never forty. It's now perhaps a little
old-fashioned as a British expression, though you can still find
examples in newspapers and daily speech. The usual meaning, as you
will have gathered, is to do something at a great rate. It most
often refers to speed of speaking, as in this instance from the
Daily Mail of 23 October 2003: "Talking nineteen to the dozen, her
conversation is still peppered with outrageous references and bawdy
asides." The idea is that the rate of talking is so great that when
other people say merely a dozen words, the speaker gets in 19. It's
also sometimes used to describe rapid heartbeat in times of danger,
and to refer to other fast-moving or fast-changing things (like
dogs' tails). Nobody seems to have the slightest idea why 19 is the
traditional number to use here, but it has been in that form ever
since it was first recorded in the eighteenth century.
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